Tag Archives: technology

On Tuesday, January 3rd the ShareStream server will be down for maintenance and an upgrade. This means any media (videos or audio) uploaded to ShareStream will not play and no media (videos or audio) will be able to be uploaded to the server while the upgrade is taking place on the 3rd. The maintenance and server upgrade will allow for a new user interface to be released later in the month and increased functionality, but basic operation will not change. We apologize for any inconvenience this may pose to you.

In this update….

Info on the FYE Game, the Student Technology Survey, and the eLearning Orientation Reboot.

FYE Game Site

If you attended the Convocation session on the FYE Game, please find that here:

You can now request your copy of the FYE Game site! How? Follow these simple directions:

Email ITS at: elifacultysupport@tri-c.edu.

Ask to be added as a faculty member in the 2016 FYE Game course site.

Login to Blackboard, and use the Course Site Request System to request your own copy!

May the odds be ever in your favor.

We are currently incorporating the feedback from the session, so those Softchalks will be updated till end of day Friday. Don’t worry, that’s all in the cloud, so it won’t impact your ability to have a current copy of the course.

Student Technology Survey

If you weren’t at the Student Technology Survey session with Professor Sam LiPuma and myself, of course you missed the social event of the season, but you also missed hearing the sometimes unexpected but always illuminating results of the 2015 college-wide survey of students about technology! Check out the presentation below:

eLearning Orientation Reboot in Course Button

We also put it into a course site via a button! It comes with 5 quick accompanying quizzes to test students’ knowledge in 5 domains:

Managing Your Time Well

Being a Successful Student

Being an Online Student at Tri-C

Using Blackboard

Computer and Internet Basics

Students get digital badges when they hit 80% or above in the quick quizzes.

Do you want your very own button? Email elifacultysupport@tri-c.edu and ask to be added to the 2016 eLearning Orientation Reboot course as a faculty member. You can then copy the entire button into your courses!

Are you at East or West Campus today? We’ll be sharing the prototype of the Gamified version of the FYE course. The course will be available to request for the second 8-week fall semester.

West Campus

Location: WSS GO4-B

3:00 – 3:4 0 PM

3:50 – 4:30 PM

East Campus

Location: East Center for Learning Excellence

4:30 – 5:00 PM

Can’t make it to one of the sessions? Don’t worry! Find information about the course, the reasons why it’s being created, and view Quest 1: College and Career Planning. Check out the Blendspace curation used for the presentation below:

You will still be able to access Blackboard during the My Tri-C Space outage due to the upgrade. There will be no change in courses.

How do you access Blackboard? You will be able to still go tohttps://my.tri-c.edu/. ITS will be putting up a page that has a direct link to Blackboard. If you normally go directly to Blackboard at bblearn.tri-c.edu, you can still do that too!

You should be able to use Blackboard as normal during the upgrade. If you have support needs during this time, call (216) 987-4257 or email eLearning@tri-c.edu.

When the My Tri-C Space upgrade occurs, you will no longer have a Blackboard Tab – but those resources will now be located within Blackboard as soon as you login! See before/after screenshots below:

Questions? Be sure to “comment” below or on the LMS pages. You just have to create a FREE WordPress account. Want to follow us but don’t want to comment? Just put your email address in the field at the left-hand side of the page, and you can get automatic updates without creating a WordPress account. – Sasha

Here’s a great little video of young French students playing with older technologies, and trying to guess what they are. We had a good laugh over what these children thought of things like floppy disks and a GameBoy. It’s interesting how younger folks can take technology for granted because they’re just not aware of what came before it.

This video is Rated O, which means it may make some viewers feel older. Viewer discretion is advised!

A recent report published by EDUCAUSE has provided us with some insight into student views of technology. The results indicate eReaders aren’t taking off, and Facebook is far more popular than Twitter. Other interesting results from the survey included 96% of students saying they were on Facebook, with 7% of those respondents noting they used no privacy restrictions.

Want to know what the future workforce thinks of technology, how it uses search engines, social networking, and online collaborative tools? The recently released ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gives some excellent insights into trends in college students’ technology ownership, perceptions, skills, and habits.

The 2010 report was recently released by EDUCAUSE, a non-profit organization that supports the advancement of technology in higher education. The report is based on a survey from the spring of 2010 of over 36,950 freshmen and seniors at 100 four-year institutions and students at 27 two-year institutions.

With the election weeks away, Fremd High School teacher Jason Spoor asked students in his government class, some of them first-time voters, to research local candidates vying for office.

They would have 15 minutes and one learning tool: their cellphone.

“If you are driving down the street and headed to vote, you don’t have a computer at the touch of a hand. You have a cellphone,” Spoor told his students last week.

The lesson would have been impossible in the past. But with cellphones tucked in the book bags and pockets of three-fourths of today’s teens, many high schools are ceding defeat in the battle to keep handheld technology out of class and instead are inviting students to use their phones for learning.

Under a teacher’s guidance, students might record themselves speaking a foreign language, text an answer to an online quiz or send themselves a homework reminder.

“It’s one of those things — if you can’t beat them, join them,” said Jill Bullo, principal of Wheaton North High School, which plans to review its policy this year.

Tech Facilitates a Return to Learning in Iraq

The violence that came in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had a double-edged effect on higher education there. Professors fled the country and the students that remained had no one to teach them. Despite pleas to return home, many have elected to remain in exile.

So now the Iraq Scholar Rescue Fund has created the “Iraq Scholars Lecture Series” to unite those expatriate scholars with Iraqi college students via technology.

The Scholar Rescue Fund, run by the Institute of International Education, helps to get endangered scholars, targeted by religious and political extremists, out of the country where they’re living and out of danger. Now they’re helping those same professors to get their knowledge back in.

It’s astounding how quickly technology can change. In just a decade we’ve gotten a device that is twice as fast, 115 times as light, and has more storage space, four times as much memory, and a comparably sized display. And it fits in your pocket instead of taking up your desktop. What other technological advances do you think are impressive?